Engineers in America: Too Young, Too Old

When trying to hire engineers, do you find that they either have too little or too much experience?

In Breaking the $300B Barrier: State of Semiconductor Industry, I discussed the state of the semiconductor industry in general. Today, I'd like like to start a discussion on the apparent aging of the engineerings in the US market. This is far from scientific research, so I am taking some leniency on the subject.

Three different events occurred recently that brought this subject to the forefront for me. First, I noticed a trend when trying to hire replacement engineers for several positions. Prior to the 2009 crash, we at EAG hired a group of engineers for application development. This is basically a hardware/software engineer who designs and develops hardware, software and applications, so they need a good mix of skills. The applicants were many and there was a large pool of qualified candidates with different levels of experience in the industry.

We retained most of the talent during the downturn in 2009, then started a slow hiring program in 2010 to 2012. We tried to target an experience level of five to 10 years for some senior positions. We asked for some specific experience on one of the large semiconductor test platforms. We were surprised by the applicants. Instead of getting resumes with the level of experience we were looking for, we received either foreign students looking for a sponsor or senior level engineers with over 20 years of experience. We polled a number of our customers to see if they had any candidates and the response was basically the same.

This experience has repeated several times, leaving me to wonder where the good, young engineers were to replace the present workforce. When our company changed focus and looked for an embedded development engineer, we did get a better pick from the experience pool, partly because it seemed like a growing field, with less maturity. Still, the experience level was strongly biased towards the two ends -- either no experience or over 20 years of experience.

The final piece of evidence came at the GSA event held recently in Silicon Valley. The median age appeared to be in the late 50s, and youngsters were those in their 40s. Now it should be noted that this tends to be an event with more senior management types, but it is a bit concerning. I worry about what is left behind and who is going to take over the innovation and drive the industry forward.

It could just be that we have heard for so long that everything is moving to Asia, that it has discouraged many of our young people from studying engineering. This leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy. CEOs complain about lack of talent, and at the same time state that they are going to Asia. Where is the incentive for the younger generation? While this seems to affect the test and application development field more than some of the newer fields, there does appear to be a general aging trend. This leads to the question, who will be there to pick up the slack once us grey hairs leave? My hope is the new STEM push will help infuse some much needed new blood into the US engineering stream. Please let me know your thoughts and ideas.

I'm with Wnderer. Employers are the problem. In the years that I worked as an engineer, only once did I work for a manager who knew what he was doing. And the higher ups? Forget about it. They only cared about themselves, not the company or the engineers that worked for them.

Why is 20 years of experience a bad thing? Companies say that they can't afford to pay these guys, but can they afford not to?

I want to know when Bill Hewlett or Dave Packard ever fired a staff member for having "too much experience"! Hogwash, this is one of two things, it's either an excuse for firing someone whose level of experience would otherwise legitimately qualify them for a raise, or it's a new cloak for that ancient practice of age discrimination applied instead to your own employees. It's also a clear misunderstanding that everyone WANTS to move into management, that if you've been on the technical side for a decade or more you're just "a management candidate who could never cut it" that the corporation would be better off without.

Now I do understand that technologies have a much shorter "half-life" than they used to but this can get carried to extremes. I recall the story of the son of an acquaintance of mine who was hired as a summer intern before he even had a sheepskin to work for a networking outfit that was later acquired by Intel. He THOUGHT he had the "inside line" on a rewarding career, only to be approached by his boss to say that they had to let him go because he was "over the hill" in his chosen profession - if I recall the story correctly at that point he was all of 26!!

Honestly if you don't have anyone working on the technical side with more than 10 years of experience, in my opinion you're just being condemned to repeat the mistakes of history you never had the opportunity to learn in the first place. I realize not everyone will agree but there HAS to be more to engineering than "early retirement" at 50 (that no one can afford to take anyway), given that HR departments (especially in Silicon Valley) are set up so they never need to interview anyone over that age for an engineering positon so they can't be accused of discriminating in the first place.

Given the market for engineers crashed about five years ago, it's no surprise to me that there are few candidates in the 5-10 year experience range. None at 5 years because no one was hiring them five years ago to have given them that experience. At the higher end, anyone with 5 years of experience who survived the downturn and kept their job is probably not out looking for a new job because they are already well situated. The ones with 20 years of experience, though, may have numerous reasons for seeking a new position, including being pushed out of their current position due to their high salaries and competition by their 10-year experienced coworkers.

In the meantime, it's true that fewer students are entering engineering in the US, in part because that same crash scared off some students entering or in college at the time, and in general because the glamor of engineering faded with the decline of space programs.

Yog-Sothoth wrote: When I was a kid, there was a buzz about technology - the Apollo years, the possibilities of electricity being so cheap (due to nuclear power) and the promise of reduced work hours due to technology making life easier.

Yes, I remember a topic in grade school we considered: "what would people in the future do with all their extra leisure time?" Actually, many people have lots of leisure time these days: the 7% who are officially unemployed in the USA and the many more who have given up looking for a job and are no longer counted. In many European countries it's far worse.

The problem is poor distribution of leisure time -- you have engineers and teachers working 60-80 hour weeks, and unemployed people with oodles of time but no financial resources to use it effectively for things like further education and travel. OTOH, many unemployed middle-aged people are living with and caring for aged parents, so it's not like they're doing absolutely nothing. In fact, I suspect that if the jobs picture improved overnight there would a crisis finding enough people to care for the elderly.

Nobody said EAG did not end up hiring people with both more and less experience than we were looking for. I personally have over 30+ years in the industry. The blog was meant to ask the question about there being a hole in the experience pool that could cause some issues both now and in the future for the industry as a whole. It is also a problem for companies to not have a variety of experience on their staff so you can get different perspectives and approaches to the issues. We and many other companies have programs where we actually do hire fresh grads and train them in parallel with other hiring. Those grads need mentors.

What is it with this society that older folks can't create or not productive and should be committed to pasture -- of course there are some who should. However, one should look at the value they get from years of practical experience and the knowledge base. One cannot dismiis someone simpley because they are old. Evaluate individuals based on what they can contribute and not on thier age.

Since when is 20 years experience a bad thing? And if you're not willing to hire young engineers, train them and provide them with experience who will? Employers like you are the problem. The 'Too Young' is caused by engineers who give up the profession and never attain the experience. The 'Too Old' are not too old and are what's left over from a more enlightened age.

I have seen this as well looking for embedded firmware people. We get senior people, but can't pay them at the level they were used to before the big company layoff.

We were looking for a journeyman level, not green, just out of college, not to senior. Too many senior people does not work as a team either.

The 25-35 year old engineer is not doing test or semi or embedded. They do Java, Python, database, web front ends and mobile, Android and iOS. That is what the cool kids were doing when they graduated, so that is their expeince.

Semiconductor and industrial need better marketing about the advantages. Maybe the maker movement will save us.